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Middlemarch, generally accepted as George Eliot's masterpiece, appeared serially in 1871 and 1872. In this book Eliot's piercing intelligence and deep imaginative understanding came to full flower. Virginia Woolf calls it "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." Its pictures of provincial life are superb in their color and ac... more »curacy, and its leading characters are unforgettable : the emotional, idealistic Dorothea Brooke; the futile and pathetic scholar Casaubon; Rosamond Vince, stubborn and selfish; Dr. Lydgate, passionately devoted to his medical theories; and Mr. Bulstrode, the banker, who praises God but harbors a secret past.

No Victorian novel," writes V. S. Pritchett, "approaches Middlemarch in its width of reference, its intellectual power, or the imperturbable spaciousness of its narrative."« less